If you use more water, or more electricity, you're consuming finite resources that wouldn't be used otherwise. The same isn't true of bandwidth--the ISP is paying for a certain amount on their outgoing connections, regardless of whether or not uses are actively using it.

You need electricity to use bandwidth...
Even so, water and electricity are not finite.

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @06:31AM
from the marrrrrrrket-share dept.

John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, made some revealing comments in an interview with Kotaku about how the company's attitudes are shifting with regard to software piracy. Quoting:
"Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA. But around that cloud Riccitiello identified a silver lining: 'There's a sizable pirate market and a sizable second sale market and we want to try to generate revenue in that marketplace,' he said, pointing to DLC as a way to do it. The EA boss would prefer people bought their games, of course. 'I don't think anybody should pirate anything,' he said. 'I believe in the artistry of the people who build [the games industry.] I profoundly believe that. And when you steal from us, you steal from them. Having said that, there's a lot of people who do.' So encourage those pirates to pay for something, he figures. Riccitiello explained that EA's download services aren't perfect at distinguishing between used copies of games and pirated copies. As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday November 20, 2009 @12:01AM
from the say-goodnight-folks dept.

lbalbalba writes "Electronic Arts is shutting down its Westwood-based game developer Pandemic Studios just two years after acquiring it, putting nearly 200 people out of work. 'The struggling video game publisher informed employees Tuesday morning that it was closing the studio as part of a recently announced plan to eliminate 1,500 jobs, or 16% of its global workforce. Pandemic has about 220 employees, but an EA spokesman said that a core team, estimated by two people close to the studio to be about 25, will be integrated into the publisher's other Los Angeles studio, in Playa Vista.' An ex-developer for Pandemic attributed the studio's struggles to poor decisions from the management."

If you line your clothes with something conductive, would it disperse the waves before reaching skin? What about your house? What about tinfoil?
I know little about this stuff, but I'm genuinely concerned about being groped internally. Talk about spooky action from a distance.

In an ideal world, this process is only a few months. This allows plenty of time to begin content creation for DLC and expansions. Including post-QA content and features to a stable build is way too risky. To ship software successfully, you need to know when to freeze an iteration and start scheduling features for the next one.

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday August 31, 2009 @11:49AM
from the don't-type-angry dept.

tomachi writes "An accountant in NZ has been awarded $17,000 NZD for unfair dismissal after her boss fired her without warning for using uppercase letters in a single email to co-workers. The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: 'To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist.' Her boss deemed the capital letters too confrontational for her co-workers to read after they woke up from naptime."

This image isn't from an electron microscope, it uses AFM (atomic force microscopy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_force_microscope), which actually touches the molecules with its tip. In this case though, they bonded a single carbon monoxoide molecule to the AFM cantilever so that it would only interact with the oxygen atoms on the pentacene molecule. I imagine it didn't image the substrate at all because of that

It doesn't actually touch the molecules, because weak force cancels out the attraction. That's kind of a key point here because touching it was too destructive to get these images in the first place.

Skip the article, read eldavojohn's post above.
The article is a failure to sensationalize shallow observations in hopes of generating traffic. It's fiction, all that matters is if you're entertained.
"EPIC FAIL" as a term, as a meme, as a method of verbalizing extremes, has become an epic fail.